College-Aged Men Take Moaning and Eye Contact For Consent, Research Reports

With so many instances of he-said-she-said sexual assault cases in the news, and victim-blaming running rampant, it's no surprise that a lot of people don't know what consent actually is. In fact, studies have shown that many, specifically young people and men, quite literally misunderstand consent. Now, a new study is out examining what college-aged men think constitutes as consent, and while the results may not be surprising, they are important to understand.

According to Inside Higher Ed, new research from Nicole Bedera, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, shows that most college-aged men in the study aren't specifically asking for consent during sexual encounters, they're assuming it.

Bedera's research recruited participants from a high-enrollment courses at a university in the Mid-Atlantic, where the school offers education surrounding affirmative consent. Bedera reportedly wanted to find out whether young men were actually implementing what they were being taught surrounding consent in the bedroom, and the answer is, much of the time, no.

“Over all, the way the respondents sought consent in their sexual encounters did not match up with the strategies they claimed to invoke,” Bedera told Inside Higher Ed. “Respondents were much less likely to ascertain explicit verbal consent and relied on their partners to initiate a conversation about sexual expectations. Most commonly, respondents relied on physical and nonsexual cues like eye contact or an accelerated heart rate to indicate consent, despite the many nonsexual scenarios in which these actions commonly occur.”

Bedera also found that men took things like eye contact and moaning (which she points out could indicate pain) as signs a partner agreed to have sex. While these signals could sometimes indicate a partner wants to have sex with you, Bedera makes an important point that these things can also just happen, even when your partner does not want to have sex. That's why it's important to establish consent verbally.

"Explicitly asking for permission is the most obvious way to escalate to physical touch, and the one most commonly discussed when enthusiastic consent is brought up," Dr. Zhana Vrangalova, an NYC-based sex researcher, writer, and educator, previously wrote for Teen Vogue. "'May I kiss/touch/take your shirt off…' 'Is it OK if I ____?'"

Dr. Vrangalova points out that these questions may be thought of as "mood-killers," but there are other ways to ask for consent, too. You can tell your partner something you'd like to do with them, then ask if they would like that, too, she suggests.

It's also important to remember that consent for one sexual act does not constitute consent for anything else. According to Bedera's research, many young men may assume consent for one thing transferred to other sexual acts, when in fact it does not.

"For safest results, it’s good to ask permission for any escalation in intimacy, so a permission to kiss someone is not an automatic permission to touch them below the belt," Dr. Vrangalova wrote.

While Bedera's research found that most of the men in the study understood and supported education surrounding what is and what is not consent, they just aren't implementing it when it comes to real life sex. But education around consent means little if we aren't taking what we learned and using it.